Jazz Funeral

or something.”
    “They’re like that here too.”
    “Ha! The first one I went to, the speaker calls on this guy and he says, ‘I’ve really been giving it some thought lately and I’ve decided Al-Anon is for neurotic wimps with no brains and no balls.’” He paused. “What do you think the speaker did?”
    “Said ‘thank you’ and called on the next person—that’s the protocol.”
    “Fat chance. He started arguing with the guy.”
    “What do you mean? Those people don’t do that.”
    “Well, they did. So, then the next person who gets called on puts in her two cents worth, and the speaker answers her back. Then the original ‘neurotic wimps’ guy answers him. Next thing you know, everybody’s mixing it up.”
    Skip was laughing now, able to see the scene all too clearly, to recognize the rugged individualists of her home state in a true-life vignette. “The Louisiana legislature’s exactly the same way.”
    “That’s what Ham said when I told him about it.”
    Ham. The word had a sobering effect on Skip. She drew in her breath, but Steve didn’t seem to notice.
    “You know what I thought when I saw that? I thought, I’ve got to find some way to move here—people this crazy are my kind of people. A whole state like the Rum Turn Tugger.”
    “Like what?” She was only listening with half an ear.
    “One of the cats in Cats: ‘He do do what he will do and there’s no doing anything about it.’”
    She gave him a vague smile.
    “So what do you think?”
    “About what?”
    “About my moving here. Did you hear a word I said?”
    “What—you’re moving here? Sorry. I was thinking about Melody.”
    He turned away. “Well, I thought I might.”
    It started to sink in. “You’re moving here?”
    “We need to talk about it. I’m in deep, you know.”
    “Uh—well, I—What does that mean exactly?”
    “With you, Skip. In deep with you.” He touched her arm lightly, but that was all. He was behaving shyly, which wasn’t like him. “I wasn’t trying to get away from you last night. I’m falling more and more in love with you.”
    “You are?” She wanted to look around and see if there was anyone else in the room.
    “Look at me!” Her eyes must have followed her impulse. “You know, it doesn’t make me feel really great to have you looking around for a way out.”
    “That’s not it. Believe me, it’s not it. Would you really move here?”
    “Well, half-time maybe. Something like that. If I could get work. Maybe I could get a more or less regular gig with the foundation. Or something else—all I need is one semiregular kind of thing.”
    “You mean it? You really mean it?”
    “Yeah, I mean it. And you know what else I mean? You are the most beautiful, curly-headed, green-eyed amazon I ever saw in my life.”
    “Amazon?”
    “Goddess. I misspoke. Would you make love to a mortal?” He was tugging on her arm.
    “I’m all sweaty.”
    “Well, okay, let’s get in the shower.”
    If the air felt like velvet, the water felt like liquid silk. It washed the case away, washed away her worry about Melody, even temporarily banished what she was beginning to see as her towering insecurity.
    She could swear she saw rainbows, but there wasn’t enough light.
    “Skip, Turn around.”
    She turned away from him, in a haze of love and passion, her mind mud, mud so wet it shook like jelly. Her focus slipped to the center of her body and her legs shook, like the mud of her mind. Steve ran his hands once over her butt and let them settle on her hips, lightly, so very lightly, and then her eyelids exploded in gold and silver stars, rivers of them, bursting out of a sun somewhere in her head.
    “Skip, don’t fall. Hold on, help me or you’re going to fall.”
    His voice brought her back; she had almost fainted from the pleasure of him. She was desperate to put her arms around him, but she couldn’t or they would disconnect. A little scream of love and delight and frustration came out of her, and then she slipped away again.
    Next he was holding her tight against the shower wall, literally keeping her up with his body, and finally her legs stopped shaking.
    Later, lying squeaky clean on her folded-out sofa, she said, “Do you see things when we make love?”
    “I saw purple irises this time.”
    They did it again, and she saw a Japanese landscape, perfect in the moonlight, orderly and ideal, unlike the rest of the flotsam that cluttered her mind. Steve saw the ocean—and a